“People like you more when you’re attractive,” said a friend of mine who has spent a lot of time losing weight and getting fit. “It’s been proven. There are a lot of studies. You’re more likely to succeed.”

“Okay,” I said. “That stuff about CEOs? Where they’re always tall?”

“Yeah,” she said. “That too. They’re always tall and have all their hair. It’s practically a law.”

I thought immediately of my dad, who is admittedly not the CEO of a fortune 500 company, but who has been successfully running a business for close to forty years. He is short and bald and didn’t go to college. He should probably be a failure. According to some study.

“It matters,” I said, slowly, “But I’m never sure just how much.”

“A lot,” she said, her voice hard.

“Maybe,” I said. “But maybe not.”

(I made a little cake for this post. I am a shitty baker. Shitty is probably exactly the right word, based on how this looks…)

When I started writing this blog about four years ago, I was positive that beauty mattered a lot. That’s why I wanted to write about it. I wanted to do something. I wanted to fight back, even if it was in a small way. How many of my friends were going to confess that they’d struggled with disordered eating back in college? More than I could imagine at that time, and it was already plenty. I had gotten cosmetic surgery to change my face, because I’d become convinced that if I could only get a little prettier, my life would improve exponentially. Oh, it sounds so superficial, doesn’t it, when you’re being quick and dismissive and morally superior. We’re all good at that. Plastic surgery is for weaker, sadder women. Except that I am one of them. And I know so many more. People I never would’ve guessed. People I never could’ve predicted.

I’ve always blamed the whole world for this. Biology, culture, misogyny, TV, advertising, ancient history, patriarchy, agricultural development, school, work, horizontal social groups in childhood that emphasize peers over mentors, the human tendency to instinctively dichotomize, our cocky refusal to admit how many problems remain even after women were finally admitted to Harvard, and so much more. The messages about just how crucial and big beauty is come from absolutely everywhere. They come all the time. They are quiet and loud and insistent and just a subtle suggestion and most of all, they are effective. They get in. They stick. They stay. And they trap us on our surfaces, agonizing over details, fretting, pinching, shaming ourselves. Because we have learned the obvious lesson: beauty matters. It matters a lot. Sometimes it matters so much that people stop eating in order to force their bodies to change. Sometimes it matters just enough to feel occasionally disgusted by your own flesh. It feels normal to dislike our appearances because it is normal. It’s completely ordinary. It’s the way things so often go.

But I find that I am some sort of pathetic, yearning optimist after all. Four years after I started writing about beauty, about a year after I had a daughter, I find myself thinking that beauty also doesn’t have to matter that much. I inch away from it. My face in the mirror is the same one I once hated, but older, of course, and maybe even more complicated. And yet I find myself forgiving it. My body, rearranging itself again after pregnancy, is a celebration. It has transformed so dramatically. Like a movie star who suddenly gets a PhD, it’s hard to keep up, but someone should throw them a party. The things that separate me from models and even from the women who everyone automatically thinks “wow” about are less significant in my own mind right now. I saw myself in the trailer for this film my doula is making, and I think I look TERRIBLE and weird and like I don’t know how to move my own mouth and like I maybe have suffered some sort of traumatic brain injury that I am only just recovering from and like I don’t have a chin and like I am not at all normal, and also, even though I think all of that, I think I sound fine. Maybe even a little smart. And I am also proud of the way I look. Maybe not there. But here, in real life. Sitting here in my wrinkled shirt from Old Navy that has a smear of banana on it from the baby, writing at my laptop. I like myself. I am happy. I am proud of being this person. I am proud of looking like me.

I look around and I see that people find wild, fulfilling love without being stunningly gorgeous. That people are happy or sad in proportions that don’t seem to really correlate with their appearances. That I admire people or find them boring without their beauty having too much meaning. People are successful all the time without being very thin. And then some of the types of success that people like to measure don’t even look that interesting to me.

I’m going to stop writing this blog now.

I argued with myself over this decision for a long time.

And I’m bad at this sort of thing. At graceful exits.

I’m not going to stop writing, ever. I can’t. I’m a writer. But I think I’m done being a blogger.

I have loved connecting with people from around the world. I’ve loved meeting them in person, sometimes, when they visited NYC or I visited somewhere else. I’ve made good friends this way. I’ve heard many hundreds of life stories. I’ve gotten recognized a few times on the sidewalk and felt cool. I’ve knocked professional goals off a stubborn list. I’ve gotten very fast at writing essays. I’ve proven to myself that I could build something out of nothing. I’ve been amazed by how many people were interested in reading my words. I’ve embarrassed myself and distinguished myself and gotten furious and hurt and once someone wrote to me to tell me she hated me and we talked and talked and she changed her mind and apologized and told me her story. People I’ve never met have told me I suck and I’m stupid and I’m shallow and I’m harmful and I’m generally a huge humiliating failure. People I’ve never met have told me that they are grateful for me. Once someone offered to tithe to me. People I’ve never met were happy for me when I was happy and sad for me when I was sad. Thank you so much for that. When I started blogging I’d literally never read a blog. Four years later, I think this experiment has taught me a lot about my own worth.

I’m stopping because I feel done. I feel ready to focus on other things. I thought that this blog might one day lead to a memoir and I worked for a long time on a book proposal, but when I had the chance to finally sell the book, I realized that I didn’t want to put it into the world anymore. I don’t want my legacy to be about my childhood, about my struggles and issues and little triumphs. I don’t really want to expose myself in that way anymore. I don’t want to read the Amazon reviews about how self-centered I am. I don’t want people to notice the story and forget about the writing. I don’t want my daughter to think of me as a woman primarily concerned with her own self-esteem, her own dramas. I don’t want my daughter to grow up watching me analyze beauty. I want her to see me being comfortable with who I am, creating new stories instead of pulling apart old ones.

For the time being, I’m still going to write over at the Sydney Morning Herald’s Daily Life, and I still write a column for Home Education Magazine, and I am working on transitioning this website into something more general, that will include all of my preexisting posts and my e-book and the beautiful cake eating photos that I treasure, and also have room for the new things I want to eventually do. I’m not sure how long they’ll take. I know the internet moves very, very fast, but I want to go slower. I want to watch Eden sit on the kitchen floor and thoroughly delve into her first nectarine. And I want to wait until she’s finished without thinking about what I should be doing instead. I want to keep the promise I made to myself a long time ago, that I would write fantasy novels with strong, awesome girl protagonists.

Anyway. I’m not sure what else to say. Except thank you, again. And if you like my writing, please stay tuned.

I didn’t convince my friend, by the way. At least, I don’t think I did. She is doing her best to tease a successful life out of the tangle of human experience. We all are. Me too. Except for me, right now, there’s a lot less looking in the mirror.

So much love,

Kate

Unroast: Today I love my eyes. Just for being mine. They’re interesting.

P.S. To the people who have been emailing me to see if everything’s OK– I’m sorry for not responding to you individually yet. I hope I can soon! I appreciate your messages so much.

Maggie texted me that there was something she had to tell me. I texted back “what’s up?” she called and she said, “My mom died.” Her baby is three weeks old. There is a picture of her mom holding him, smiling up at the camera, new grandmother pride, and the baby is JUST born, his face still scrunched and peaceful. My mind doubles back, getting confused, folding time into new, impossible arrangements. She can’t die, I reason, because she looks too young in the photo. She can’t die, because she is a grandmother now, and because she is in perfect health. I think I see her jogging on the side of the road. See, that’s her! She’s just missing. It’ll be fine. She can’t be dead because it’s Maggie’s first Mother’s Day now.

“Mother’s Day was invented by Hallmark,” my brother Jake reminds me when he calls to wish me a happy one. “I mean, no offense, since you’re a mom now and stuff. But it’s kinda a bullshit holiday.” He’s laughing, he really doesn’t mean any offense.

“Mother’s Day is the best holiday ever,” I say, laughing too. “It’s the best thing Hallmark ever did! Everyone should thank their mom. Moms are a big deal.”

“Yeah, figures you’d think that now,” he says and we talk about a thing happening at grad school.

When Maggie and I were growing up together, two little homeschooled girls running around in the woods, always covered in dirt (“soil!” my mom reminds me), our mothers were in the background of the photos. We are front and center, in Revolutionary War costumes that we made for Jake’s colonial-themed birthday party that year that all we read about was the American Revolution. I had a crush on Ben, who was the tallest, oldest boy in the homeschooling group, and Ben had a crush on Maggie, who was always so pretty even though she never for one second cared about clothes back then. The drama of being ten and eleven and twelve played out in the local parks and at the skating rink, where we did endless turns around the yellowing ice every Friday late morning through early afternoon, when the homeschoolers reigned over empty community spaces. That our mothers were doing something radical and huge and daring and weird with our childhoods, with their adulthoods, was not considered. What was considered was that Matt hated having his green baseball cap stolen, so it was everyone else’s mission in life to steal it.

Maggie went to school later on and then got into the Ivy League and studied mathy things I could never understand. She’d been two textbooks ahead of me when we did Saxon math as kids. I was always pretending to do the practice tests, she actually liked them. Later, we met up in New York and we started this blog together on a whim. She was already a blogger, I was a grad student. She was a computer programmer—she designed the original webpage in a few minutes and got it running. We had a fight. We missed each other’s weddings. We didn’t speak for a couple years. We started talking again, it was a relief. I got pregnant. We sat out in my parents’ backyard, back in NJ, me hugely pregnant, in the haze of full summer, talking about life with our computer science-y husbands. I felt peaceful. I felt like the sky was settling into the right place above me, and I was sitting in just the right spot below. I had Eden, and Maggie was the first friend to visit. She held her and she told me that she was pregnant, too, she’d just found out. We were all so happy we couldn’t stop being happy for even a second all day. She wanted my amazing midwife’s contact information. I couldn’t wait for her to become a mother, too. I kept texting her about her pregnancy. At the end, I couldn’t hardly contain my excitement. When her son was born, I showed everyone his picture, bragging about how gorgeous he was. I didn’t try to understand or explain my commitment to her little family, but I felt so grateful for them, almost as though they were another version of me, a parallel life, a matched set, a completion of something. We were in it together. Thank god. Even though I still can’t do math.

(our babies and our legs)

It’s so strange, being a mother. I love my own mother even more. I let her hug me for longer because I want Eden to let me hug her for longer, later. I remember the things that I poked at her for over the years, and I find them stupid instead of enlightened. I have figured out my mother’s issues a million times. I find myself caring less and less about them. I watch her with Eden- they are grinning at each other, sharing inside jokes already, and I am only happy. I begin to wonder what it was like for her, when we were little, when we were babies and then toddlers and then older and older. My perspective loses its sturdy footing and shifts closer to her—I am trying to picture where the moms were sitting in the park, what they might have talked about at their picnic table, when we were running away from Matt with his green hat in our hands. I look down at my hand over Eden’s hand and I see that her hand is new and pink and soft and mine is tougher, already old compared to how I remember it from childhood. And my mind slips and swirls around the idea that to Eden, I will always be old. And to Eden, I will fade into the background of the photos, even as I am the most basic thing in her life. I am like a house. Shelter, structure, safety, warmth, but once you’re living in it, you don’t have to think about these things so much anymore. How have I transitioned from myself to Eden’s mother? How am I Eden’s mother and still myself? I don’t know. It’s just life. Life is just a series of shocking transitions that should take a lifetime to adjust to, but instead we just do it, we just move through it, we just keep going.

“Where’s Mama?” I say, in my special silly voice for her. She starts to smile already, at my hands over my face. She tugs at one of them. “Peekaboo!”

I duck behind the counter and she crawls after me. I pop out, surprising her, but not really. She knows I’m going to surprise her.

“Where’s Mama?” I run around the corner, flattening myself into a doorway. I am a kid again, because she is a baby, and because you have to be kind of a kid with a baby.

Sometimes I look at her and I feel nothing. There is a blank space that stretches to breaking, an openness with no information. How am I supposed to be now? How am I supposed to feel? I try to make sense of her face, the face I made. I feel like I’m looking at it through the wrong side of the binoculars. It’s very very small and far away, even though she’s right in front of me. My life has lengthened and narrowed and distorted and my future is both far away and right in front of me.

“Twenty years ago…” my parents say, easily, watching old family videos. “Remember us twenty years ago? Look at my hair! Look at that color!”

And I think for the first time that maybe twenty years will not be so long for me, either. For anyone. Which is the wrong way to think, I tell myself, because that’s Eden’s whole childhood. That’s so many important, big things. But there is a blurriness now that wasn’t there before. I catch myself sometimes thinking of myself as a bridge between things, a transmitter, a passer-on of traits and love, a connective joint. I am not the climax of the story the way I used to be. It’s disorienting and comforting. I feel a little like the Borg.

I don’t know if Maggie feels a little like the Borg, too. If maybe she has some sense of her mother continuing in her own motherhood. God, I hope so. I see that in her already—the bravery, the willingness to be different just like being different is normal, that huge, unapologetic love. It’s a gift our mothers gave us both, I think. “You can ask any question you want,” they suggested, with our whole childhoods. We won’t always choose their choices, but we will probably always be comfortable asking.

I want so badly to help, to do something, and I feel like I’m just standing here with my hands hanging, useless.

“I love you,” I say, on the phone, hanging up after she tells me. It’s the only thing I can think of.

(I can’t seem to land those bunny ears…)

In the photos, we are little girls together, our arms slung over each other’s shoulders. Now we’re mothers together. It shifts, slips, turns. I glance around, blinking, startled. We are replacing our mothers at the picnic table, day by day. We are beginning and ending all the time. I guess that’s always how it goes.

“Where’s Mama?”

Here. I am here.

(the only photo I have of us with the babies, so far)

* * *

Unroast: Today I love the way I look with Eden on my hip. I think I must look strong, because this baby is huge.

I was on the radio recently, reading a piece I wrote about being pregnant at 26 in NYC. I’ve always thought my voice is weird and unlistenable, so I can’t bring myself to listen, but if you want to, you’re welcome to. Here’s the podcast.

You have to find yourself to find love, goes the mantra. You have to love yourself enough to attract love into your life. You have to be already be complete before someone else can complete you (wait, what?).

A lot of the advice hurled at single people suggests that there is more work to be done. You have to solve your issues. You have to learn to be happy, all of the time, on your own.

Single women are constantly blamed: You’re giving off the wrong energy. You’re too desperate. You’re not open enough. You’re intimidating. Men are attracted to non-threatening, smiley women with big, friendly teeth and a successful career that isn’t successful enough to be intimidating. You have to be self-sufficient but not to the extent that it renders you unfeminine. And don’t text him so soon after the date! And don’t sleep with him right away, for f*@ks sake! Or, wait, maybe do. You don’t want to be weird and uptight about sex.

A happy, committed relationship is dangled like the yummy, carb-y prize at the end of a grueling marathon of personal improvement.

I signed up. I jotted a quick profile, slapped up a lone, somewhat flattering photo and flung my single self out into the universe. Two weeks later, I went on a first date with a guy who sounded funny and smart in writing. He was even more than those things. I fell in love with him right away. We got engaged six months later. We’ve now been married for four years and I am still bowled over by his awesomeness. He lights up my days.

So of course, immediately after meeting him, I started preaching the gospel. “You have to sign up!” I told my single friends. “Just try it! You never know who you’ll meet!”

I talked quite a few of them into it. They went out hopefully on first dates. They reported back. Some duds. Some weirdos. And then some guys who seemed wonderful but suddenly disappeared after having sex. Nice guys who they didn’t “click” with. Gorgeous guys who seemed to be drifting, distracted. Cool, shaggy-haired photographer guys who texted “I might be free in an hr. wanna meet up?” and then canceled.

We analyzed and analyzed. I tried to be encouraging.

“Wait,” they started to say, “you met him after being on the site for how long?”

“Two weeks,” I said, but now it felt like bragging. So I began to say, “Maybe a couple months?” But soon even that sounded very quick, unrealistic.

A few of my friends found love online or elsewhere, but the majority of them are still dating. Or they’re not dating right now. They’re taking a break, because, enough already! But soon they’ll try again. Their stories are full of incredible, buoyant hope and, increasingly, creeping resignation and quiet despair.

More often now, they ask, “What is wrong with me?”

We try to figure it out sometimes.

“Well, yeah,” I’ve admitted, “you are really quick to say no.”

Or, “I guess you could take these lines out of your profile. And change the picture. Definitely put up more pictures. You need more than just one.”

Privately, I’ve sometimes wondered if they really are doing something wrong. Maybe this one can be too obliging and this one too demanding and this other one too…serious? Fun? Is there such a thing as being too fun? With other coupled women, I’ve discussed the phenomenon of our single friends. We have tried to solve the puzzle. What are they misunderstanding? After all, we found partners! Maybe we’re just awesome at love?

It’s popular, to blame single people’s personalities, appearances, mannerisms, and jobs for their singleness. And even if most of that checks out fine, we can always mine for something deeper. A quiet, existential failing. A subtle unevenness in intentionality, spiritual tendencies that haven’t yet been sanded down to pleasing symmetry. Small but persistent unresolved issues from infancy.

It’s comforting, after you find someone, to tell yourself that it happened because you’re really great, and your partner is really great, and your mutual greatness united you. The world feels less random and your life feels safer and more destined.

I felt this way a few years ago. And it was nice.

And then I watched many of my smart, kind, beautiful, smiley, clever, successful, talented, warm friends begin to turn a cruel, analyzing gaze on themselves, searching for the “problem” at the root of their singleness. Self-help books nodded eagerly along and accusing articles circulated and I began to think that something didn’t sound quite right.

Not to insult myself, but let me be real: when I met my husband I was twenty-three and cocky, insecure and earnest and full of pretentious grad school-isms. I had no idea what I was doing with my life. I was scared. I had frizzy hair and a pimple on my face. And I was wearing a shirt with slightly poofy short sleeves and a floppy lavender satin bow. I thought the shirt was fancy. I thought that looking “fancy” was a good fashion goal.

I don’t know exactly why so many people I know who want very much to find partners are still single. Here in NYC, it might be part of a larger trend. Many of the married women I meet have older husbands. It seems like men might be marrying later. Maybe online dating itself creates a problem even as it offers so many solutions. Dating can feel like sampling ice cream flavors. What’s next? The next one might be even tastier…Maybe women are choosier now than we have been in recent times. We’re more educated, and especially if we’re here in the big city, we tend to have interesting careers that we care about. We have other priorities and are looking for a partner who we find delightful, amazing, the best, because we don’t necessarily need partnership for the same basic financial and social reasons that people used to. I don’t know. Those are just some uneducated guesses.

But what I do know is that my own story, though it is personally very meaningful and takes on epic, fateful proportions in my mind and life, is really one of total chance.

For people in relationships to stop analyzing our single friends, we need to admit that what happened to us maybe had a lot to do with randomness and luck. Not that we aren’t great. But often, we’re not great in similar ways to our single compatriots. And they are often great in the same ways we are.

It’s not that no one is ever doing anything wrong, or that no one needs to work on their issues and try to be better and try to love themselves before loving someone else. Those things are important, too. But they obviously aren’t the trick to finding a loving, lasting relationship. People in good relationships come by them all sorts of ways, and at all sorts of phases and stages of life. Some of us find love when we’re at the top, succeeding and self-actualized and fabulously vivacious, others of us find love when we’re at our absolute worst. A lot of us find it somewhere in the middle. And then we grow with our partners and we hopefully continue to improve ourselves, the way we would hopefully do that if we were single.

One of the best things about being married, I’ve found, is having a safe space to become a better person without the reason for this effort defaulting at “so you can attract a great man!”

It’s frustrating how random some of the biggest things in life can be, but that, unfortunately, is the way life works. Still, I am willing to bet that my searching single friends will find wonderful partners to grow and learn with. They’ll get lucky, too. And then I wish for them the delicious satisfaction of snuggling in bed on a late Sunday morning, rehashing the details of their fateful meeting, wondering at the tremendous kindness and terrifying, miraculous specificity of the universe.

“What if…” they will sigh. “What if you hadn’t clicked on my profile?” “What if you hadn’t gone online that day?” But they will do it from inside the tall ramparts of self-congratulatory security. They will secretly believe, just a little, that they got this because they are really awesome. And they will maybe believe that they have been awesome all along.

They were awesome all along. They are awesome right now.

But I don’t want to analyze their single friends with them, later. It’s not helping anyone, and often, it’s just downright pointless.

Unroast: Today I love the way I look with my hair up– I never thought I’d grow it this long again, but it just keeps growing and I’m enjoying the curls, although a buzz cut is never too far from my mind…

I wanted to write a Mother’s Day piece for this week, but something tragic happened and changed my schedule. I’m going to try for next week instead. In the meantime, I’ll be reading an essay on the radio for a Mother’s Day program that will broadcast on Saturday, May 10, at 7:30am on WFUV 90.7FM. I hope I won’t be up that early on that day, and in case you’re not either but want to listen, I’ll share some links soon where you can find it after it airs.

I got an email from one of those extremely popular TV shows that no one I know actually watches. I was trying to feed myself with one hand and spooning sweet potato into the baby’s mouth with the other. The email had come up on my phone and I thumbed over it messily, unable to resist.

Would I be interested in coming on the show, the email asked, to talk about my experience as a real woman?

I was interested! Yes! I will talk about being a woman on national television! It’s a powerful, sometimes difficult, confusing, meaningful experience! For me, personally, there is this big question about yoga—is it possible to go through life as a modern woman without doing it at all?

But wait. There was a little more.

They were looking specifically for someone size 12-14, who isn’t comfortable with her appearance. This, succinctly, was the working definition of “real woman.”

So, how about it? The emailer was obviously in a hurry, but she was friendly.

Eden banged on the table. MORE. Seriously, cow, what’s the hold-up? (She refers to me as her cow, you know, with her eyes, even when I’m not actively giving milk. It’s a pesky habit.)

I laughed at my phone and gave her more. Then, immediately, without thinking, I wrote back. And then I thought for a minute.

I am generally a proponent of the “we all know what was meant” school of thought. I think maybe this is an underrepresented group on the internet—generally I pretend I’m not a member, in order to avoid being unnecessarily yelled at. Political correctness in language has become so nit-pickingly obsessive that it can sound a lot like a desperate effort to make up for the wanton callousness of the in-person world. Some pieces have so many disclaimers, you can hardly find the subject text. (“I fully recognize my own privilege, in its every complex, subtle, tiny iteration: to begin, I am sighted, so I am able to clearly make out these letters that form the words I am typing, which gives me a significant advantage in life over people who suffer from a range of ocular differences that affect the way that they perceive and are able to interact with the visual world. Of course, not everyone will understand this as an ‘advantage,’ per se, and to even use this sort of judgment-laden language reveals my own implicit biases…”)

I also totally appreciate how tempting it can be, as a relatively smart person who reads a lot, to quibble over semantics. You feel like you’re accomplishing something, doing nerdy battle against the forces of ignorance and oversimplification and raising the red pen of equality. I spot a typo in the New York Times, sometimes, and a small, smug smile seizes my lips and I shake my head disapprovingly. “Ha! Gotcha!” The writer assumes that everyone is male—I roll my eyes and resist the urge to leave a pithy, biting comment. I AM NOT A MAN, thanks very much. (I need to maybe work on my biting comments, anyway).

So when you say “real woman”, giant TV show, I know what you’re talking about.

You’re talking about someone who doesn’t look like the photoshopped, glistening-limbed, ultra-thin, poreless–skinned, preternaturally bright-eyed, perky-boobed visions of femininity we’re all constantly presented with to the point of tear leaking saturation. Real women are the rest of us. The underrepresented majority of us. The ones who will never be arranged, mostly naked, on a billboard. We are only supposed to feel bad about this, I think, because we are expected to have been convinced, simultaneously, that this sort of thing is synonymous with female success. Look at the timeless, classic arrangement: rich, famous man dates/marries abnormally gorgeous young woman. Often a model or someone has “done a little modeling” (which is maybe even cooler). These things, we’ve learned, are equivalent: a man is powerful in the world through his social and financial achievements, a woman through the chance and strict maintenance of her physical composition, her surfaces, extending only as deep as her “bone structure.” Even though this type of success is complicated by how poorly so many professional beauties are treated and how expendable and brief most careers based on a girl/woman’s appearance are, we’re taught to be jealous.

We are the lucky ones, their heavy-lidded eyes seem to suggest from the glossy ad pages that outnumber the quick content in every women’s magazine. Real women are not so fortunate. We are the 99%.

Maybe this is the clothing size range of the average American woman these days? I remember once hearing that 12 was the average size and that number has been sitting around in my head ever since, taking up space I could definitely use for something better.

I don’t think the person who emailed me meant it this way, but it seems totally possible that the TV show did: if you are a size 12-14, you are probably feeling pretty sad on some level, about your body. You are also fit to represent all of the women who feel left behind by the cruel whims of fashion, by virtue of being approximately the size they probably are too. Woe unto the women who exceed a size 14! (Unless a separate email went out to a different group?) And the women who are smaller than a size 12—how triumphant they must be feeling! (Unless they will also be represented, being sad, too, because they are still not perfect or thin enough.)

Actually, I don’t want to pick at the TV show and the email. They are simply pointing out something that’s already everywhere. They only exist because of something much more pressing- this tendency to divide women along the line of our sizes. The practice of pretending a compliment by calling some of us “real.” The fact that “thinner” has come to mean “more attractive”, generally speaking, and the effort to address that through ostensibly supporting the ones who don’t cut it by defining them as more authentic, if not actually better.

No, no, we’re reassured, SOME people think “real” women are even better! It’s just the big, bad beauty-media-machine, churning out images of impossible-looking fantasy girls faster than the speed of light—THEY are the ones we’re fighting against. The people who tell us these things mean well (I have been one of them, and I definitely know I mean well!), but I can’t help noticing that “real woman” is beginning to sound a little like an accusation. Like a failing. You’re the gritty, honest item. You’re the slums. You’re the cold, pimply truth. And there’s no mistaking it: being a “real” woman is all about what you look like. Our appearances, even when they can’t lead to that kind of success we’re all supposed to want most, are still the first thing. They are the tag hanging off us that shows which section of the store we belong in. We literally are our clothing size.

The email isn’t original in its accidental offensiveness—it’s earnestly piggybacking off the unavoidable idea that we must be sad, when we are real. Real=sad, now. Of course it does, because “real” is the opposite of “stunningly beautiful.” And stunningly beautiful is the constant, often unspoken desire.

The TV show is, I think, trying to help. There will be a special, I’m guessing, about how damaging the media’s portrayal of beauty can be. About how much pressure women are under to look a certain way. Real issues for real people. I write about them a lot, too. I think these are really important topics. They’ve become increasingly popular topics. Which is opening up new, interesting issues.

Because this is happening, I think it’s also important to look at what it means to call someone a “real woman” right now, today, in this environment. What are we saying about women? About what matters? About the way we are expected to already feel? About the way we’re supposed to feel about other women, who look different from us? Despite my best efforts to sit tight in the “we all know what was meant” camp, I can’t help but write this piece. This is me giving in. This is me standing up. Or at least standing up halfway from my seat, sweet potato smeared everywhere.

“The thing is,” I wrote back, “I just don’t feel that bad about the way I look. But if you ever want to talk to a real woman, a new mom, who is feeling better and better about herself, let me know!”

I was surprised when I got the response, “Will do, thanks!”

It was really very nice of her.

Still, I kind of doubt I’ll ever appear on national TV to discuss the topic of being a real woman of my particular size (which is not, by the way, 12-14, so I am automatically disqualified anyway), life, happiness, challenges. But if I ever do, I hope I remember to point out that, while we’re getting into semantics, absolutely every woman is “real.” Even the models on the billboards. Even the women who aren’t actually on billboards but look similar to the ones who are. And being among the 99% of women who don’t look like that doesn’t have to mean automatic self-hatred or even mild self-dislike. Some of us real women love ourselves, size 12 and up bodies and all. Size whatever we happen to be bodies and all. Some of us love our bodies FOR instead of despite their deviations from the standard pretty line. Some of us are just not paying a ton of attention to exactly how our bodies fit or don’t fit into the random mold we’re always shown. But if we do care, and if we do care terribly, painfully, as we too often do, then we all need to address this issue not by continuing to divide women up into groups based on how we look but by emphasizing how much more than our appearances we are and always have been. That’s what’s real, people.

(I couldn’t think of ANY photos that made sense for this piece, so I just went with spaceships. Since I like to look at them. source)

* * *

Unroast: Today I love the way I look in yellow. I remember people always saying that yellow is a really hard color to wear, that very few people can “get away” with yellow. Isn’t it funny to wear a color defiantly? As though it matters at all.

A friend shared the article on Facebook. It was about me, and how I’m irresponsible and dangerous and possibly a smidge un-American. How I make bad choices. Isn’t it crazy, how someone could be as crazy as me? A bunch of people agreed, in the comments underneath. Under the article itself, back on its host site, a fierce, self-important debate raged. “Anyone who acts like this is an idiot and should have their citizenship taken away. We don’t need people like you in this country,” announced “ArmyMom” from North Carolina.

“If you met me, you might not think that,” I wanted to say. I always want to say that and I never do.

It wasn’t the first time an article like that has been written and shared. And of course they’re not really about me, individually (although this has actually happened once or twice, too! But usually on someone’s blog, not, like, in New York Mag). They’re about people like me. Weird people who do weird things. A representative from the League of Normal People has to come along and write a chastising explanation about why we are bad.

Sometimes it’s sneering:“What is WRONG with these people? Do they have any contact with reality? Um, hello. Reality is over here, weirdos, with the normal people. Get over yourselves and maybe we’ll consider one day sharing our cold, hard, real-American pizza with you.”

Sometimes it’s scientific:“Recent Conclusive Statistics show that your weird behavior is more likely than our normal behavior to result in death and lower SAT scores and also bad breath.”

Sometimes it’s defensive:“APPARENTLY, according to the weirdos, we’re SUPPOSED to do this crazy thing…And I felt pressure from the weirdos to think about my life differently. But then I decided not to, because that was too hard and weird, so I’m doing the normal thing but I’m mad at the weirdos for even suggesting that there is another way to do it!”

I am amazed by the volume of articles in this last category. I see them everywhere. People proudly defending their right to do the totally expected, ordinary thing against the imagined onslaught of opinionated weirdness.

But where are all the opinionated weirdos? I wonder. I glance around hopefully. Anyone? Hello? Where are the influential, popularizing weirdos who are marching at the front lines, waving their banners and demanding that everyone follow suit?

There are a couple, sure, I guess. But mostly, people doing something really different seem to keep pretty quiet about it. I know I do. Because it’s uncomfortable, in mixed company, in most company, to be the eternal other. Or even when it’s perfectly comfortable, it’s awkward to get into a whole discussion about it. You worry about sounding confrontational, even when you’re just stating facts about your life. You worry that your weirdness might come off as threatening. So you throw it out there like litter from a car window and you hit the gas and keep moving. “Yeah, I had a home birth, but whatever! To each her own type of birth! GOD, I’m glad it’s finally spring. What a friggin’ winter, right?”

There are many pieces of my life that make me alternative and strange and threatening. Some I chose, some my parents chose for me, some I was born into.

I am weird now, as a parent, in so many of the ways that people like to get worked up about. People like to mention moms like me in their articles about how they got an epidural (thank god!) despite the preaching of the supposed “sanctimommies” who had natural births just to prove that they’re stronger and better than everyone else. I am a huge wimp and I think all of my friends are stronger than me and I had a home birth. I plan on doing it again. And what of the breastfeeding Nazis? (I cringe at any usage of the word that doesn’t refer to actual Nazis who slaughtered real people instead of just annoying them.) I am big on breastfeeding and not planning on weaning any time soon. I do it because it feels right in this gently obvious way that gives me refreshing relief in the absence of stumbling around uncertainly until I wander into some sort of reasonable-sounding answer. I don’t have to ask. I’m already sure. Much to the disapproval of the baby books and pediatricians, my baby sleeps in bed with me. That too feels happily simple. Universal, even if it isn’t trendy in America right now. So I am more likely than everyone else, according to some but of course not all recent studies, to kill my child. Or spoil her. Or both! Yet another free-roaming, wild hippie baby in Brooklyn, literally spoiled to death.

(a DIY flower crown! not that anyone else was going to DI for Y, but still! yes! source)

I even made an effort to use cloth diapers at first.

“I’m not really a hippie,” I told a mom I’d just met, apologizing after being forced to reveal incriminating details about my weirdness. What I really meant was, “You’re getting an incomplete picture. If you heard other details, you’d think something else of me entirely.” (Isn’t this always the case?) What I really meant was: “I am not trying to do these things for the sake of being anything. I’m just figuring it out as I go.”

“You sound like a hippie,” she said.

I laughed uneasily. Her words stayed stuck in my head for days. For weeks. Had she been teasing me when she said it? Probably. It was probably good-natured. But maybe she felt superior? Had she catalogued me in her head, slotted beneath the “weird” tab? Would she listen to more of the story?

My favorite foods are cheap New York pizza and 5 Guys bacon cheeseburgers. I love superhero movies and Agatha Christie novels and I watched a lot of Burn Notice while pregnant and sick. I watched a lot of White Collar while breastfeeding a newborn. I’ve watched a lot of similar TV without a good excuse at all, just because I like it. I went to a state school for college and I worked the whole time. I try to make a good impression on people but sometimes feel awkward. I am friendly. I can’t run a mile to save my life. I haven’t seen very much of the world and I really want to one day. I tend to like people. I am trying to be more confident.

The weirdest part of being weird is discovering, bit by bit, year after year, in so many tiny, subtle ways and so many huge, plain ones that I am actually boringly, surprisingly, obviously normal.

We all know, in one way or another, what it’s like to feel like the odd one out. We become a “woman in tech” or stay single longer than most of our friends or marry our high school sweetheart when everyone we know is staying single. We are the only vegetarian or the only one still eating whatever we want in a sea of careful, restricted diets. We don’t have a degree. We have three degrees and are doing something that has nothing to do with any of them. We don’t have sex until we fall in love. We have experimental sex for pure fun in an abstinence-only environment. We decide never to have a child and are pleased with that decision. We want to have a huge family in a time when birthrates are declining and the word “selfish” is lobbed at people juggling three or more kids. We have a BMI that other people feel entitled to judge harshly and vocally. We are gay. We quit a stable, boring job to have an awesome adventure. We work at a stable, boring job every single day because we need the money, even though we are always reading about how important it is to pursue personal happiness at all costs and be creative and take risks and distinguish ourselves spectacularly. We are married to a stay-at-home dad. We are a stay-at-home dad. We are born into something that strikes people as “alternative,” like an unexpected combination of cultures and ethnicities. Like the way we look compared with the way we talk. Like our job compared to a stereotype of kind of work “someone like us” tends to have.

I didn’t go to school, growing up. I am Jewish. I am mostly proud of who I am and what I do.

We are all weird in many ways, we are all normal in many other ways. So much so that the weird/normal dichotomy begins to sag under its combined weight, and little tears appear in the fabric. But when we do or are or try some of these relatively rarer things, and other alternative things I haven’t mentioned, we will inevitably notice an article, shared on Facebook, about us. Especially if we are choosing to do something most people wouldn’t.

What’s interesting to me is that there isn’t really a contest. Not enough people homeschool to truly undermine the school system, even if this practice were actually undermining anything. There aren’t enough women in tech to restructure the dominant maleness of the field. There aren’t enough stay-at-home dads to rewrite the common story about work and fatherhood. Not enough (American) women have home births to make it the looming, inevitable second option, after going to a hospital. Not enough of us do the weird stuff in strong enough numbers to make these choices statistically equal to the more typical, familiar paths they get endlessly pitted against. This is not a battle between two similarly sized armies. This isn’t a battle at all. It’s just the world, where sometimes some people decide to do things differently, or can luckily afford to do things differently, or make big sacrifices to do things differently, or just experiment briefly with doing things differently. Where people are always, always a little bit different from one another. It’s OK.

So if you find that you are threatened by the idea of rogue difference, and imagine that there really are breastfeeding Nazis who are currently hating you forever for feeding your baby a bottle, then maybe you should take the time to talk to a weirdo like me. I’ll probably be friendly. We might even hit it off. I promise, I will not yell at you to be just like me. That would be weird.

(This is not at all a comprehensive list. It’s just the first stuff that came to my mind. And my mind is all over the place.)

I want more movies and TV shows to have female protagonists even when they aren’t about “girly stuff.”

I want the way coolness works to stop being about not being sensitive. Sensitivity and vulnerability are healthy, crucial aspects of being a fully operating person. Without them, we miss out on the things that make poetry timeless and life rich. Making fun of ourselves and other people is not necessarily a bad thing, but there needs to be plenty of room for caring automatically and whole-heartedly and even just a little about stuff, too. Or maybe we can just all care less about being cool?

I want it to be a lot harder to find gross photos on the internet. I feel like we should all be able to google without running into graphically documented surgical procedures and abused animals and car crashes and unusual, dramatic skin conditions.

I want there to be more swimsuit options. Why do they all demand that I pay a lot of attention to what my pubic hair is doing? Mandatory bikini waxing is ridiculous. If we can’t get over the fact that adult women have pubic hair, let’s at least wear swim trunks.

(googling for “bikini” resulted, predictably, in a million examples of the last topic, too. maybe I just wanted to see the bathing suit? maybe? source)

I want porn to actually be varied. I keep reading about how it is. Whenever someone writes an article about porn, they’re always like “you can find any crazy thing out there! If there’s a fantasy, there’s a video of it on the internet!” But the reality is that most of the readily accessible porn is endless repetition of the same themes, and popular among those themes is total female submission and, often, humiliation. Yes, some women like to be humiliated, but that’s not the point. We need a lot more versions of female sexuality, and it’d be much better if they popped up, too, upon a casual googling.

I want girls to be able to run around and study and make friends and play and goof off and think and look in the mirror without having to prioritize their appearances. Being embodied is about a lot of stuff, not just the way we look. I want girls to enjoy their bodies without having to think first about whether or not other people find them attractive.

I want this for women, too, but it starts with girls.

I want articles about accomplished women to be about those individuals, and not have to say things like “as a woman in this particular industry…” The articles about accomplished men tend not to mention their maleness and how that impacts their lives and careers. It’d be cool if we could celebrate individual women without everything they do having to be about womankind. It puts a lot of pressure on individuals to have to represent all of womankind.

It also makes it sound like it’s slightly unusual for women to be accomplished. I don’t want it to feel even slightly unusual for women to be accomplished.

I also don’t want “accomplished” to necessarily mean “running a huge company.” We need more definitions of success and more women populating them.

I don’t want freedom of speech to get lost in a sea of people saying really cruel things to each other just because they can. I want being kind to be just as culturally important.

I want the world to feel big and accessible. I want it to be accessible.

I want everyone to agree that keeping the earth healthy is incredibly important. And then I want national and international policy to reflect that.

I want everyone to have basic rights and even a few rights beyond that. I want it to sound weird that gay people weren’t allowed to get married. I want that to sound like it must’ve been a long, long time ago, when everyone was unenlightened and all of the girls and women wore skinny jeans almost exclusively and all of the senators looked the same.

I want people to stop reflexively hating other people without knowing anything real about them. It’s a terrible habit. I’m sure it makes tons of sense when seen this way and that way, and through the lens of centuries of careful anthropological observation. But it’s the worst thing. And I wish I could raise my daughter in a world that wasn’t poisoned by it.

I want there to be fewer commercials. And I want the commercials starring women to be less about low fat yogurt and Swiffer and shampoo and indulging in the occasional tiny, tiny chocolate after you’ve shopped for all of your family’s holiday gifts and more about the rest of the things people do. Because the commercials for women often suggest that women are generally feeling guilty about something (eating too much fat, having a messy house, not having smooth enough hair, trying to do “it all” but failing) and just need to chill out a little. Maybe we don’t feel guilty, though. Maybe we’re already eating a giant chocolate bar and we’re not buying anyone gifts this year and we’re just trying to watch a dumb cop show, damnit, so stop telling us we’re probably feeling bad about ourselves and let us get back to it!

I want the language of women eating food to change, so that we’re not constantly reciting apologies and disclaimers and little self-effacing jokes whenever we pick up a fork. I am sometimes totally guilty of this. But really, let’s just eat.

I want the “mommy wars” to go away. They’re not real, as far as I can tell from the ground. I’m standing in the field, but there’s no battle. Just a bunch of different strollers with similarly complicated folding mechanisms. Whatever it is that I am doing as a mother and with the other parts of my life when Eden is old enough to notice my life, as long as I’m not hurting anyone, I hope people will treat my choices with respect. I hope they will treat all not hurt-y choices with respect. And then let’s talk about it without the endless comparisons.

I want those twenty-something women who walk down the street in clusters of three to explain how they all came to be wearing the exact same shoes. I see this all the time, and I’m really curious. Do they always go shopping together and pick them out? Are they only friends with people who already own the same shoes as them? Are they just subconsciously drawn to one another because their style is similar enough to suggest compatible mindsets? WHAT IS THE ANSWER?

“Sharon Stone Tells Shape She Doesn’t Want To Be ‘An Ageless Beauty,’ Is Still One Anyway” goes the Huffington Post headline. It’s refreshing, says the reporter, that Stone doesn’t long for eternal youth. It’s refreshing, also, we’re clearly meant to agree, that she looks eternally youthful.

This is how we, as a culture, celebrate older women, when we celebrate their beauty. And often, unfortunately, we are celebrating beauty first and the rest later, in a smaller room in the back. We praise those women who, like great illusionists, amaze with the magic trick of their appearances. We are impressed with women over forty for looking like they’re not yet. We admire women for confusing us at first sight, we show respect to the ones who can manage, mysteriously, to look nothing like nature suggests they should look.

The problem is, we can’t agree on this vision for the future (what? The rest of you don’t want to see me naked on the beaches of my sunset years?).

Every other commercial directed at women over forty trumpets the miraculous properties of yet another anti-aging formula. The models demonstrating the product’s effectiveness appear to be twenty-three. The goal, it’s always implied, is to look as close to twenty-three as is humanly possible, no matter how many decades past it you happen to be.

The lesson is learned. Many of the older women I know seem to be wrestling with their own biology in order to look more like my peers and less like themselves. That’s why I’m glad to see examples of women looking like they aren’t twenty-three anymore in the sphere of fashion and beauty,like Jacky O’Shaughnessy, the 62-year-old American Apparel model.

(source. when I followed this link I found this fashion blog, with fun photos of and interviews with “advanced” models)

Her image floods me with immediate, unquestioning relief and pride- but that’s part of the problem. Right now, she stands out like a radical statement, like a shout in a quiet room. The relief is a result of her unexpectedness. We need to join in and raise more voices until it sounds more like a party and less like a museum. What would it feel like to live in a world where being beautiful with wrinkles and white hair was normal?

Still, small steps can go in the right direction. Look! we can point to her. Look how beautiful with white hair!

Of course, we should look up to older women first for their accomplishments and wisdom. But obviously, and automatically, we are looking to them for clues about our whole futures. We need more examples of women looking comfortable looking like themselves. When we get them, it’ll be much clearer that what matters about being a woman isn’t primarily superficial, and that our experience of the way we look shouldn’t revolve around trying to look different.

And yet, as Sharon Stone ironically said in the article that accompanies her ageless, airbrushed photos: “… This idea that being youthful is the only thing that’s beautiful or attractive simply isn’t true. I don’t want to be an ‘ageless beauty.’ I want to be a woman who is the best I can be at my age.”

In my late teens and early twenties, I fought hard to look different, to change myself in order to fit an image of beauty that loomed so large it felt inescapable. A couple years later, sitting around a table with friends, it turned out that most of us had grappled with one or another form of disordered eating. “Can you look at this?” my smart, serious twenty-seven-year-old friend asked the other day, leaning in, pointing at her forehead. “Is that a wrinkle? I’m scared it might be a wrinkle. Do I look old to you?”

We’ve learned that looking old is like a vicious beast, panting at our heels, always about to catch us and drag us down into the pit of eternal ugliness.

“Definitely not!” I said immediately, reciting my lines, “I don’t see anything! You don’t even have to think about that. We’re so young!”

We won’t always be so young, though.

Does it have to have such an ominous ring?

It’s been a long road for me, already, to feeling OK about myself, inside and out. To not harassing myself over my reflection every time I see it. I’d like to keep feeling more comfortable with who I am, including my appearance. I don’t want to look forward to a future of looking backward. None of us should.

So let’s celebrate women for being, and looking, themselves. It’s not only important for women over forty, it’s important for me, and for my friends, and for teenaged girls and little girls, too. It’s important for the thirty-somethings. It’s important for everyone to see and believe that there is no shame in being a woman, at any age.

* * *

How do you want to look when you’re a couple decades older than you are now?

Unroast: Today I like a little bit more the weird, floppy way I move in videos. It’s funny and unique, and I don’t know why that’s what I do and how I look, but it just is. (I’m seeing myself in videos way more than I ever have, because we are taking a million videos of Eden all the time)

Katy Perry was singing “You’re hot then you’re cold! You’re yes then you’re no!” on the radio and Bear and I were driving towards the mountains on our fourth date. “I like your sunglasses,” he said, and when I glanced at his profile, it was adorably boyish. He was blushing faintly and his little smile was the helpless kind, where you can’t not smile. Everything is too good to not smile. I didn’t know anything about him except that he felt completely right and I felt completely right with him. I started singing along with Katy Perry, even though it was the first time I’d heard the song. He joined in.

We were yes! We were not even a little bit no.

I was twenty-three.

I had never made a reservation at a restaurant because I’d never, as an adult, gone to one nice enough to need a reservation.

Bear was twenty-five. That seemed well into the totally grown-up range. He’d made a reservation for our first date, even though the restaurant was not in fact very nice, and I was impressed with the casual way he gave his last name, like he was used to eating out. Eating out impressed me (I either made all of my own meals or got a slice of pizza somewhere). Taking a cab impressed me (they did that on TV but everyone I knew exclusively rode the subway). Wearing ragged New Balance sneakers paired with Cargo pants did not impress me, but I thought it was cute that he didn’t own any jeans because he thought they were too fashion-y.

I was pretty sure I could blow this guy’s mind—worldly table reserving and all.

*

A few days ago, we were driving on the highway in Florida, headed back to the airport from Bear’s aunt and uncle’s home, where his ninety-five year old grandmother lives, too. We finally made it down there, for the weekend, so that Eden could meet her.

Eden hates the car so much. “Babies love the car!” people say, speaking of the accomplished babies of legend whose parents are always fresh-faced and proud.

Eden started to cry the second her butt hit the car seat. And now she cries “Mama! Mama! MAMAMA!!” lifting her chubby little arms in an anguished plea for help. It’s a little bit heartbreaking.

We were running late, naturally, and there was no time to pull over and comfort her. Nothing short of freedom works.

“ABCDEFG! HIJK, LMNOP!” we sang at the top of our lungs. “THE ITSY BITSY SPIDER!! WENT UP THE WATER SPOUT!”

“MAMAMAMAMAMA!!!” she wailed.

“I can’t do this,” said Bear, his face crumpling.

“Stay focused!” I said. “Keep driving!”

She cried for forty minutes. I was hunched forward. Bear’s face had gone tight.

“So,” I said, looking at his profile. “We made a baby!”

He didn’t respond.

I am twenty-eight. My birthday was earlier this month.

I have made a few restaurant reservations in my time, though honestly, I still feel awkward doing it.

She repeats herself a lot. She asks the same questions brightly, curiously, clearly sure this is the first time.

“Your parents must be crazy about the baby?” she asked me, maybe fifteen times, when the conversation paused. I was a little embarrassed at first, answering again and again. But then I realized I liked it. I could shade my responses differently each time, to deepen our exchange.

“Yeah, they’re so excited about her!” I said.

And then, “Yup! She’s their first grandchild!”

“They’re really good with her. I love watching them playing with her.”

“My mom gets to spend a lot of time with us, and she’s so close with Eden. Eden reaches for her the way she reaches for me.”

“My dad was sure I’d have a girl, even though I thought I’d have a boy for some reason, and he’s all smug about being right. He’s an amazing grandfather. Eden thinks he’s hilarious. He’s like the baby whisperer.”

“My mother is really passionate about developmental psychology, so watching Eden is even more interesting to her than it would be for other people. She’s a teacher, too, now.”

“Yes, they are.”

Even if I wasn’t satisfied with my answer, I knew I’d get another chance. It was reassuring.

Several times, she mistook Bear for his father, and she talked to him as his father. They are both big and bearded and gentle.

What must that be like, I wondered, to have experienced whole lifetimes, overlapping in an epic familial tapestry, fathers and sons becoming each other, generations blurring. It seemed to me in that moment, sampling sickening Campari at Bear’s Italian uncle’s urging, that there was something majestic happening here.

Age seems to have peeled away the superfluous details like names and dates and left the core of things exposed.

“She’s a precious baby,” she said, over and over. “You’re all so lucky to have each other. This is the best thing in the world.”

I have only been around Bear’s grandmother on a handful of occasions, but each time, I feel warmed by her. This time, I noticed that her eyes are blue. Eden’s eyes are blue, too, still, even though neither mine nor Bear’s are.

*

We were twenty minutes away from the airport when I finally thought to turn on the radio. Christian rock blared and Eden stopped crying to listen. She grew quickly irritated and I changed the station. A guitarist playing Bach. She was intrigued. The whole car seemed to expand, breathing out in relief.

“In honor of Johann Sebastian Bach’s birthday month, we have a special program,” the smooth-voiced announcer informed us soothingly. “Johann Sebastian Bach was born in 1685.”

“Can we please do more music, less talking?” I asked her.

“Bach was once quoted saying that his success could be attributed entirely to his hard work,” said the calm, classical voice, “But of course we would disagree. It’s perfectly clear from his music that he was also exceptionally talented.”

“Seriously,” I said. “You need to get to the music. Right now. I have a baby over here.”

Eden made an unhappy sound, on the verge of an unhappier sound.

“And it is a testament to his genius that his music remains relevant today,” she said.

“I don’t know that I’d use the word ‘relevant,’” said Bear.

“Yeah,” I said, trying to think about what relevance really means, automatically agreeing because Bear is often right on a technicality.

Eden settled again, muttering to herself. Something about a certain “mama” and how that mama was neglecting to free her from the hideous torture chair she’d been strapped into. At least, that’s my guess.

But she was not crying. Santana had saved us.

The Florida highway went straight out, forever, pointing confidently to the rest of our lives.

And suddenly we were singing: “I would give my world to life my world, to lift you up! I could change my life, to better suit your mood…”

I put my hand on the back of Bear’s neck, the way I did on our fourth date. We smiled at each other. We would give our lives, to lift each other up. And the kid in the back, too.

We have a little tapestry ourselves, already. It’s nice.

It’s awesome.

It’s the best thing in the world.

Happy birthday to me! Happy birthday to me.

(cheesecake from my dad)

* * *

Happy birthday to everyone else with one in March! Any birthday epiphanies? I love those.

Unroast: Today I love the way I look in a wrap dress. So simple. Yet maybe a bit elegant?

“What do you do all day?” asked someone who reads this blog. Shouldn’t I post more often, since I must have so much time? And then later, in a follow-up comment, this reader wondered why I hadn’t published that book I’ve mentioned working on. What have I been doing instead?

There it was: the question. The moment I’d been dreading.

When I had Eden, I chose to work part time and spend the rest of my time with her. I am extraordinarily fortunate to have this option. It feels a little like a dirty secret.

(yes, this is part of what I do all day)

I am embarrassed, sometimes, that I haven’t gone further in my career by now. I would prefer to have succeeded in ways so obvious and succinct that they would fit on a nametag. I would like to have fulfilled the potential that feminism and social change and modernity have given me. That my mother gave me. That my father believed I had just the same as my brothers.

I know the SAHM rhetoric—this is important work, too. Women’s work doesn’t always pay. You are doing something essential. You are doing the work of shaping an entire person! But it doesn’t stick to me, it slides right off. I feel like I’m cheating on my ambitious self with this new role. And yet I’m actively choosing it. I am unable, somehow, to not spend this time with my daughter, knowing I have the chance. I am unable to believe that work is everything, even as I’m unable to believe that motherhood is everything. I flounder somewhere in the middle, in a gray area where balance and confusion circle each other with territorial defensiveness.

I stared at the question on my phone while nursing the baby. I could practically feel my milk turning sour. I thought about how to answer as I tried for forty minutes to convince Eden that, no, really, she should have a nap. Finally, she was asleep, and I hadn’t eaten yet that day because there hadn’t been time, but under the microscope of the question, I felt abruptly like I was doing nothing.

I sat down at the computer, checking the baby monitor compulsively, and wrote back, explaining my schedule. See, I write these columns, and I work over here, too, part time, and I have these goals, which I am reaching for, and I don’t update the blog more than once a week because I want to take time to make the essays something I am proud of.

Implicitly, I was apologizing to this stranger for not being the right kind of woman. I was clarifying that maybe I am a little bit closer to being that woman than I may at first glance appear to be.

It took me a day to realize that. Then I got angry.

And I realized something. I realized that this question is bigger than the balance of my days in my one little life. It’s for all of the women whose accomplishments don’t fit into a neat, impressive, single-word title. It’s for all of the women who can choose to do what looks like nothing to the people who haven’t cared for a baby or a child. It’s for all of the women who are doing something that doesn’t make money or doesn’t make the kind of money they might otherwise be able to make.

And actually, it’s even bigger than that: it’s a question about what it means to be a modern woman. What it means to be a “good” woman.

It’s the same question that magazines ask when they publish articles about “having it all.” We read about it in books about leaning in or leaning out. We are, as a culture, obsessed with what women are doing with their time. What women are doing all day. Are women living up to their potential? Are they opting out? Are they sacrificing their kids for their political career? Are they sacrificing their career for their kids? Who are they spending their time with? Is their time well-spent?

I got angry at myself for trying to explain my days to the blog reader. For always trying to explain to strangers, to the world, to my family, to my friends, to myself. For constantly searching for the right words to make my life sound like it fits into the right narrative so that everyone can agree it’s a good, successful, acceptable kind of life.

I got angry because it isn’t anyone’s business what I am doing all day.

Or why I choose to spend my days this way. It isn’t for the world to decide that caring for a chubby, backwards-crawling baby is valuable or a waste of time, or to evaluate my part time paychecks and decide if they count as enough of a contribution to the finances of my household.

It’s none of anyone’s business if taking care of a baby is really hard or really easy, and if my work is adding enough to the culture at large.

It’s none of anyone’s business if I am a good woman. If I am doing the things that they think a good woman should do.

When women are asked what we are doing all day, the next question, sometimes silent but almost always present, is “why aren’t you doing more?” We may disagree on what constitutes the “more,” but it’s always there, looming, bearing down, about to topple over and crush us under its bulk.

Instead, why don’t we look at what is actually being accomplished? We are doing different things from one another and different things even from ourselves, because we are full of surprises. We are doing so many things that change every day, every year, every stage of life. So many things that can sometimes be measured in grades and sometimes in money and sometimes just in the quiet satisfaction they produce that no one else gets to see.

So, what do I do all day?

I try to live the best life that I am able.

And now, damnit, I’m going to finally have something to eat, because I haven’t had time all day. After that, who knows? Use your imagination. I might be doing anything.

* * *

What are you proud of accomplishing?

Unroast: Today I love I felt the day these photos were taken. On the cusp of spring, so excited for Eden’s discovery of the outdoors, and having easy conversations with strangers at the playground. Sometimes being a mother makes me so confident.

A woman was attacked by four boys a few blocks away from where I walk every day with my baby. She was hit on the back of the head, for fun, I guess, and she is OK. Except that I wonder if she is really OK, because how could she ever feel safe again? It was the middle of the day. She was walking her dog. What did the dog do, when it happened, I kept wondering. Did they try to hurt the dog, too?

I read a report from Mother Jones about how sippy cups are giving kids cancer. How BPA free plastic is maybe even worse than whatever BPA itself is. Which is like, shit, do I have to start learning how to carve wood or throw pottery or something in order to raise a healthy child? There’s already the whole thing about hormones in meat and chemicals in everything else we eat and toxic flame retardants in all of the foam that’s in everything we ever sit on and parabens and just the plain old fumes coming off the highway right outside our building. You don’t want to get paranoid, you want to be practical. But you want to be wary and aware, I think. You want to be alert.

And then a few days ago I saw a man stomp on another man’s face in the street. It sometimes feels like such a dangerous world, I wonder how I keep blithely going outside, and here I am flinging a child into it.

(Bear carrying Eden earlier that day)

It was a beautiful day. Flirtatiously warm, thrillingly close to the border of spring. We decided to walk all the way down the east side of Manhattan, from Madison Square Park, across the Brooklyn Bridge. Why not? We switched off with Eden in the carrier, and she was on me when it happened. We hadn’t gotten very far. At the corner of 15th St and 1st Ave, a man shoved another man down, and the second man rolled into the dirt of one of those half-hearted planters near the curb.

For a moment, I thought they were joking around somehow, and then Bear jumped forward and all at once I could see that it was something terrible: one man was trying to kill the other. One man, in a blue t-shirt, was stomping on the other man’s head. The movement of his leg, the stomping boot, the blank, helpless face of the man on the ground, the vividly, exuberantly blue shirt, the traffic drifting by, the wrongness, the few people nearby not acting yet, frozen—it was all a rush, a tidal wave of information. And Bear was jumping forward and yelling, “Hey! Hey! Stop!”

I clapped my hands and yelled, trying to get the blue shirted man’s attention. Like I was trying to call off a dog shaking a wounded pigeon or something, I was trying to get his attention so that he would stop killing the man on the ground. An instant later, though, I was pulling Bear away, and dragging him across the street, where there was a break in the traffic luckily, and I was telling him, “move.” Because I needed to get my family away. The blue shirted man had looked up and he stepped towards us for a second and I had to get my baby away from him. She started to cry and I had my phone out and called 911, saying to Bear numbly, “I should call 911.”

The voice on the other end was a little bored, which is exactly how it is in my nightmares where I call 911 but no one cares and no one comes.

“I’m at fifteenth street and first ave and there’s a man being beaten in the street,” I said. “In front of the Chase bank,” I added, looking across the street at it.

“Is the perpetrator still there?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, “He’s wearing a blue shirt.”

“Is the man who was beaten still breathing?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t see him right now. I have a baby.”

“Okay,” she said, as though this made perfect sense.

“Is the man who beat him white, black, or Hispanic?” she said.

It was hard to remember something like ethnicity for some reason, although I could remember the motion of his leg very well. The angle that his foot had come down onto the other man’s face. My brain was stuck there, because I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to stomp on anyone else’s head.

“I should go back over there,” said Bear.

“No,” I said, and I dragged on his arm like an anchor.

Cop cars erupted out of nowhere and a crowd formed. I was still on the phone with the 911 woman. It was impossible to tell what was happening across the street, but I didn’t want to know anyway. We turned away and walked in silence, holding hands. Even Eden was quiet, maybe sensing the seriousness.

An ambulance screeched by and people glanced up curiously, because there were more cop cars, too, and it was strange to know where they were all headed. Usually the problem seems distant, possible but not definite, as though sirens are just an especially authentic detail, fleshing out the city scene.

New York is such a safe city. I’ve seen women jogging alone in the parks at night.

“Did I do the right thing?” said Bear, finally. “I don’t know if I did the right thing.”

“You can’t go forward,” I said, “if that happens and you’re alone. You can’t go towards it. You have to get away and call 911.”

“I didn’t know I went towards it,” he said.

“You did. I grabbed your arm and pulled you back. You have to think about your family.”

I realized that maybe no one would ever be a hero if they always thought about their family, but I didn’t care. I just wanted my family to be safe.

“Should we get a cab?” said Bear. “I should get you guys home.”

“I don’t know, maybe,” I said.

He ran ahead to hail a cab, waving urgently.

The sky was a cheerful blue, which now seemed like an inappropriate color.

“Row, row, row your boat,” I sang in a tiny, distracted voice, “gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily….life is but a dream.” It sounded kind of creepy. Eden seemed to think so, too.

“Baby!” cried the cab driver in a hearty voice from the front. He craned around to see her. “Woof! Woof!” he barked enthusiastically. “I’m a doggy!” And then, “Meow! I’m a cat!”

“Is that a doggy?” I asked the baby, a little absently. “Do you hear a dog barking?”

“I love babies!” the driver explained to us.

“You have kids?” I asked automatically.

He’d been waiting for this.

“Two kids! Much bigger. My son is twenty. My daughter is fourteen.”

“Wow!” I said, mustering some friendliness.

“My son, he’s at university now, at Binghamton. You know it?”

“It’s a very good school!” I said, knowing I’d heard the name before but unable to recall anything about it.

“Very, very good school. And he works with an assemblyman already! He has perfect grades. He is very smart.” He shoved a cell phone through the partition suddenly. “That’s him!”

The son was in a suit, standing with the assemblyman, very handsome and upright.

“So handsome! He sounds like he’s really smart!” I handed the phone back.

“Yes. But my daughter, she’s even smarter! She got the highest scores in Staten Island for the ninth grade.”

Eden cried louder, demonstrating her own abilities.

“Woof! Woof!” went the driver. “Listen, baby! Do you hear a doggy?”

My head felt jumbled, too many things colliding inside, too much contrast. The murderous scene on the street, the cheerful, loving father driving the cab, bragging about his children to random passengers. Bear’s face was blank, Eden’s mouth was wide open in a breathless yell of rage, I was smiling and my smile reflected back to me in the murky plastic of the divider. Too many things colliding– that’s New York City. Maybe that’s just being alive.

“So,” said Bear, later that night, “Where should we move?” He was mostly joking.

I remember when I moved to the city and my grandma got scared even though she grew up in Brooklyn back in the day, and she reminded me not to be out at night by myself ever. Someone else warned me never to make eye contact on the subway. But it was automatic- I looked up. I sometimes had whole conversations with strangers on the subway. Once, when I was twenty-four, I sat next to a five-year-old and we had a great conversation.

How can we ever feel safe at all? I don’t know. We just do it. We have to believe in the basic goodness in strangers. We try not to give our kids too many sippy cups when it turns out they’re full of weird carcinogenic chemicals. But we probably allow for some plastic anyway. Because you can’t let yourself go crazy worrying. All of life is risk, after all.

I hope that man who was beaten in the street will be OK.

I hope the woman who was attacked a few blocks away from me will be OK.

I hope my baby will grow up safe and be OK. After I finish writing this, I’m taking her outside for our daily walk. It looks like it’s another beautiful day and I want her to see the sky.

Unroast: Today I love the way I look in pale blue. I never used to wear it because I thought for some reason, from the time I was a kid, that only people with blue eyes should wear blue. It turns out that is not a real rule.